Allie Terry-Fritsch | Bowling Green State University (original) (raw)
I received my Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Italian Renaissance Art History in 2005 and am now Professor and Chair of Art History at Bowling Green State University in Ohio (USA). My research focuses on the performative experience of viewing art and architecture in the early modern period, with a particular focus on fifteenth-century Florence. My published research includes books, articles, and book chapters on Italian modes of viewership, the co-involvement of the spectator in Renaissance works, and the history of art patronage.
My co-edited book, Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, was published by Ashgate in 2012 and issued in paperback by Routledge in 2016. Interrogating how medieval and early modern communities have acted as participants, observers and interpreters of events and how they ascribed meaning to them, the essays in this collection explore the experience of individual or collective beholders of violence during the period. Addressing a range of medieval and early modern art forms, the contributors examine the complexities of viewing and the production of knowledge across temporal moments. https://www.routledge.com/Beholding-Violence-in-Medieval-and-Early-Modern-Europe/Terry-Fritsch-Labbie/p/book/9781409442868I
My latest book, Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence: Renaissance Art and Political Persuasion, 1459-1580, is published with Amsterdam University Press (2020). The book examines the immersive, multisensory contexts for viewing art in Medicean Florence as strategies for the mindful fashioning of Renaissance audiences into political communities.
My next book is on Fra Angelico's Public: Renaissance Art, Medici Patronage, and the Library of San Marco. It builds on research that I first performed for my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago and have continued through the support of research fellowships sponsored by the National Endowment of the Humanities, Fulbright, Pittsburgh foundation, University of Chicago, BGSU, and SACI-Florence, which considers Fra Angelico's frescoes at San Marco from the point of view of the humanistic community that was once active at the Observant Dominican convent during the time of Cosimo de'Medici, between the 1430s and 1460s. Opening the study of Fra Angelico at San Marco to a secular audience, the book analyzes the paintings that were made along the humanist itinerary within the cross-cultural context of the Council of Florence (1438-9) and suggests that Angelico's works provided a visual exegesis of the humanistic interests pursued within the convent and applied in the political sphere of the Renaissance city.
Articles have appeared (most recently) in the journals Art History, Renaissance Studies, Open Arts Journal, Medieval Encounters, and Journal of Theater and Religion, and book chapters in, The Senses and the Experience of God in Art in the Franciscan Tradition (2019), Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World (2018), Visualizing Sensuous Suffering: Pain in the Early Modern Visual Arts of Europe and the Americas (2018), Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300-1650 (2015), Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (2013), Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300-1350 (2012), Renaissance Theories of Vision (2010), and Sex Acts and Visual Culture in Early Modern Italy (2010).
I am grateful to several institutions for grants and awards to support my onsite and archival research, including the National Endowment of the Humanities, William J. Fulbright Foundation, the Italian Art Society, the Pittsburg Foundation, Universität Salzburg, Studio Art College International in Florence, Institute of the Study of Culture and Society at BGSU, School of Art BGSU, Faculty Research Council BGSU, Department of Art History University of Chicago, Hannah Holbern Gray Renaissance Studies Fellowship University of Chicago.
Supervisors: Charles E. Cohen , Robert S. Nelson, and Ingrid D. Rowland
Address: 1000 Fine Art Center
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, Ohio 43403
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Books by Allie Terry-Fritsch
Amsterdam University Press, 2020, 2020
Viewers in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were encouraged to forge connections between their phy... more Viewers in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were encouraged to forge connections between their physical and affective states when they experienced works of art. They believed that their bodies served a critical function in coming to know and make sense of the world around them, and intimately engaged themselves with works of art and architecture on a daily basis. This book examines how viewers in Medicean Florence were self-consciously cultivated to enhance their sensory appreciation of works of art and creatively self-fashion through somaesthetic experience. Mobilized as a technology for the production of knowledge with and through their bodies, viewers contributed to the essential meaning of Renaissance art and, in the process, bound themselves to others. By investigating the framework and practice of somaesthetic viewing of works by Benozzo Gozzoli, Donatello, Benedetto Buglioni, Giorgio Vasari, and others in fifteenth and sixteenth century Florence, the book approaches the viewer as a powerful tool that was used by patrons to shape identity and power in the Renaissance.
In this radical reassessment of Fra Angelico’s frescoes at San Marco in Florence, Allie Terry-Fri... more In this radical reassessment of Fra Angelico’s frescoes at San Marco in Florence, Allie Terry-Fritsch connects the history of the Observant Dominican convent’s fifteenth-century patron, Cosimo de’Medici, with the history of its once famous public library to recover a nearly forgotten, but critical, audience for the artist’s work comprised of lay humanists. Fra Angelico’s Public traces the footsteps of the secular users of the San Marco library through the church, convent, and dormitory and examines the painted marvels that they encountered along the way. Considering the intersections between the iconography and style of the San Marco paintings with the intellectual interests of the library users and the larger social world of Medicean Florence, Fra Angelico’s Public recasts Angelico as an artist who, in addition to his life as a friar, was a clever participant in humanist culture and painted in ways that resonated with their habits of mind. By means of visual, theoretical, and historical study, the book considers how Angelico’s paintings reference popular religious culture in Quattrocento Florence and became vehicles through which the lay-humanist audience participated in a collective viewing experience that framed their intellectual endeavors at San Marco, as well as Cosimo de’Medici’s role as patron, within the political ideology of the city at large. Investigating the political effects such a message may have had on its humanist audience at San Marco, Terry-Fritsch examines the aesthetic offered by Fra Angelico at San Marco in a new light, one that moves beyond the cloister walls and into the public realm.
Edited Books by Allie Terry-Fritsch
"Interested in the ways in which medieval and early modern communities have acted as participants... more "Interested in the ways in which medieval and early modern communities have acted as participants, observers, and interpreters of events and how they ascribed meaning to them, the essays in this collection probe the individual or collective beholders of violence during the period and question how they made sense of the world around them. Addressing a range of medieval and early modern art forms, including visual images, objects, texts, and performances, the contributors examine the complexities of viewing and the production of knowledge across temporal moments.
In considering new methods to examine the beholder's perspective, this volume addresses such questions as: Can we speak of such a thing as the "period eye" or an acculturated gaze of the viewer? If so, does this particularize the gaze or does it risk universalizing perception and thus empty out the very certainty that it seeks to confirm? How do violence and pleasure intersect within the visual and literary arts? How can an understanding of violence in cultural representation serve as means of knowing the past and as means of understanding and potentially altering the present?"
Articles and Book Chapters by Allie Terry-Fritsch
Performing the Sacred: Christian Representation and the Arts, ed. Carla M. Bino and Corinna Ricasoli, 2023
The innovative artistic program of the Sacro Monte di Varallo, which combines architecture, wall ... more The innovative artistic program of the Sacro Monte di Varallo, which combines architecture, wall and ceiling paintings, and life-sized polychromed statues, traditionally has been cast as staging a frozen performance of the Bible for pilgrims. This essay shifts attention away from the frozen sculpted and painted actors of the individual chapels and instead focuses on the dramatic roles played by the mobile, sentient Renaissance pilgrims who performed in their spaces. As the essay highlights, the artistic program functioned as an immersive installation that invited the live pilgrim to perform the Bible, thus turning the table on traditional conceptions of stage and actor.
Open Arts Journal, Jan 2015
This essay examines the ways in which renaissance pilgrims cultivated their bodies and minds to e... more This essay examines the ways in which renaissance pilgrims cultivated their bodies and minds to enhance aesthetic and devotional experience at the Sacro Monte di Varallo, a late fifteenth-century simulation of the Holy Land located in northern Italy. Built by a team of architects, painters and sculptors at the behest of Franciscan friars, the Holy Land at Varallo presented to the pilgrim a series of interactive spaces housed in independent architectural units, each containing life-sized wooden or terracotta sculptures of Biblical figures adorned with real hair, clothes and shoes, and situated in frescoed narratival environments. Pilgrims were led to each architectural site along a fixed path and encountered the Biblical scenes in a strict sequence that was narrated by a Franciscan friar. If the pilgrim engaged in proper performances of body-mindfulness, the site served as a pilgrimage destination that was equally enriching as “the real thing,” that is, Jerusalem itself. This essay questions how the active cultivation of the pilgrim’s body and mind contributed to a heightened somaesthetic encounter within the multi-media interactive chapels at the site and argues that the mindful manipulation of the body functioned as what the performance studies theorist Diana Taylor has called a “vital act of transfer.” That is, it transmitted carefully crafted knowledge of the past and the self through reiterated acts that impacted in significant ways the identity formation of the spectator-participant, as well as the community of spectators who surrounded them.
By considering the historical experience of the site, this essay ultimately provides an alternative explanation for artistic style at Varallo, which, as argued here, must be understood through the somaesthetics of the artistic program’s original viewers. The physical performance of viewing at Varallo accentuated awareness in all sensory receptors to activate the prosthetic body and mind of pilgrims, who were physically challenged while simultaneously mentally engaged as they made their way through the steep and winding landscape of the site. Invited to enter into the architectural environments and to touch, smell, taste and hear, in addition to view the holy simulacra, both male and female pilgrims recorded the powerful affective bonds produced through such active bodily cultivation and spiritual stimulation. Thus, in many ways, the somaesthetic strategies employed at Varallo enabled pilgrims to move beyond traditional gendered notions of the performance of the body in devotional contexts and to assume the role of both a Biblical personage (or multiples thereof) and a contemporary pilgrim to the Holy Land.
By approaching the Observant Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence as a “practiced place,” t... more By approaching the Observant Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence as a “practiced place,” this essay considers the secular users of the convent’s library as mobile spectators that necessarily navigated the cloister and dormitory and, in so doing, recovers, for the first time, their embodied experience of the architectural pathway and the frescoed decoration along the way. To begin this process, the essay recovers the original “public” for the library at San Marco, then reconstructs the pathway through the convent that this secular audience once traveled to reach it. By practicing the place, the essay considers Fra Angelico’s extensive fresco decoration along this path as part of an integrated “humanist itinerary.” In this way, Angelico’s decoration may be understood as not only a deposit of a social relationship between the mendicant artist and his merchant patron. It also may be read, for the first time in art-historical scholarship, as a direct means of visual communication with the convent’s previously unrecognized public audience and an indicator of these viewers’ political and intellectual practices within the Florentine convent.
This essay presents a new reading of Fra Angelico's frescoes at San Marco in terms of the secular... more This essay presents a new reading of Fra Angelico's frescoes at San Marco in terms of the secular humanist audience that once had access to the site in the mid-Quattrocento. The frescoes that lined the humanist itinerary from the ground floor entrance of the convent to the library on the primo piano are stylistically distinct from those frescoes made for the Observant Dominican friars within the dormitory and are notable for their elimination of spatial cues in favor of vast color fields. As I argue here, the frescoes made for the humanist-users of the library represent a pictorial language of the icon that would have spoken to Cosimo de'Medici and his fellow humanists in an erudite alternative to current Florentine artistic theories revolving around Albertian perspective. I argue that the contemporary intellectual and political interests of the humanists-- above all their current Greek translation work and their exposure to Byzantine images through their collecting pursuits in the Byzantine empire-- impacted their approach to these paintings. I suggest that the humanists were making visual and theoretical connections between Angelico's paintings and Neoplatonic and Byzantine theories of images, for Angelico's color fields are theoretically analogous to the Neoplatonic writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and are tied in form and function to Byzantine mosaics and icons. Situating San Marco within this framework, new modes of understanding the intellectual and political significance of Angelico's work come to light.
Abstract: The positive reception of sacre rappresentazioni by an Eastern official at the Council... more Abstract:
The positive reception of sacre rappresentazioni by an Eastern official at the Council of Florence (1439) counters recent claims that visual representation in the West failed to communicate across cultures in the fifteenth century. The essay analyzes the form and function of the sacred dramas to probe the relationship between pictorial and dramatic representation and the theological foundation of the Byzantine image. The sacred dramas arguably function in an aesthetic mode akin to the Baroque conception of meraviglia, which is examined as a form of visual rhetoric that allowed for cross-cultural communication in fifteenth-century Florence.
ABSTRACT: While Donatello’s bronze sculptures of Judith and David are stylistically discrete, an... more ABSTRACT:
While Donatello’s bronze sculptures of Judith and David are stylistically discrete, and may have been originally created in and for different contexts, they are firmly connected to one another through their content: both figures clearly are characterized as active agents of decapitation. As this article argues, the Medici fostered a familial association with the iconographic, symbolic and practical language of decapitation in Florence since the Albizzi coup of 1433-4, when the family came to be associated with the feast of St. John the Baptist’s martyrdom, through the placement of the Donatello sculptures in the family palace in the 1460s. Although rarely mentioned in the vast art-historical literature on the Medici, visual allusions to beheadings in paint, performance and sculpture served a rhetorical function in Florence to describe the shifting political status of Cosimo de’Medici and his family. By outlining a cultural map by which this visual rhetoric of decapitation may be charted in relation to the Medici family, this article contributes yet a further layer of meaning to the Donatello sculptures within the larger context of early Medici patronage and politics and offers a new methodological approach for the investigation of early modern Florentine visual culture.
This essay approaches Donatello’s fifteenth-century bronze sculpture of Judith as a dramatic acto... more This essay approaches Donatello’s fifteenth-century bronze sculpture of Judith as a dramatic actor in “The Story of Judith, Hebrew Widow,” the sacred story written by Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’Medici in the 1470s. When considered as a text to be performed, Lucrezia’s sacred narrative fostered a particular way of viewing Donatello’s sculpture in the garden of the Palazzo Medici. Lucrezia’s words signal moments in which her audience was expected to look up and see, particularly when she speaks of Judith. During these active visual moments, Lucrezia strays from the standard narrative of the female heroine and either embellishes or leaves out content. In these self-conscious expansions and gaps in the narrative, the audience was invited to read into the narrative and personalize its protagonist, which, in Lucrezia’s daily world, was vividly evoked in material form in Donatello’s bronze Judith in the garden. Just as in Florentine sacre rappresentazioni, Donatello’s sculptural group acted out the demonstration of justice through its gestural performance. Furthermore, Lucrezia’s manipulation of her audience’s somaesthetic experience may be connected to the subtle way that the matron shaped her own identity within the intimate circles of the Medici family. Such performative interplay between listening inside the palace and witnessing Florentine identity politics in dramatic sculptural form is critical for understanding the full visual and symbolic potential of the statue in the garden as well as its leading lady in the 1470s.
in Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Ed. Merry Wiesner-Hanks (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017).
By examining the type of beholding experience that was cultivated for condemned criminals in Flor... more By examining the type of beholding experience that was cultivated for condemned criminals in Florence, this paper challenges previous readings of the criminal process within a strictly Christological framework and provides a new interpretation of Fra Angelico’s Lamentation, made for the the site known as the "Tempio" in Florence. I argue that the gaze of the criminal before Fra Angelico’s altarpiece was rendered Magdalenian in nature, for the criminal was positioned as a sinner in a moment of conversion. The visual imagery that surrounded the criminal throughout the day of execution, as well as the somaesthetic stimulation of the penal rituals, prepared the criminal beholder for this transformative performance in front of Angelico’s altarpiece. Like Mary Magdalen, who prostrated herself before the body of Christ in repentance of her material indulgences, the criminal was faced with the incarnate vision of God and asked to make the cognitive shift from the material to the spiritual. Transcending issues of gender and class, the Magdalenian gaze was understood in fifteenth-century Florence as part of a larger repetoire of prayers and bodily gestures that communicated a specific request for forgiveness and the promise of redemption through reformed behavior. The criminal adoption of a Magdalenian stance at the last hour thus precipitated the redemption that was necessary for the soul’s ascension after the expiration of the criminal body.
Abstract: Using the Bargello as the focus of an inquiry on material culture, historical framing... more Abstract:
Using the Bargello as the focus of an inquiry on material culture, historical framing and aesthetic cultivation, this essay interrogates the use of violence as an aesthetic frame for tourists to Florence, and examines the architectural transformation of the prison in terms of the cultural agenda of the nineteenth-century Risorgimento and its manipulation of the material culture of the city. As scholars of the early modern period increasingly have begun to recognize, the writers, artists, governmental officials and other communities involved in the production of knowledge in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries largely fashioned the image of the renaissance in Florence and elsewhere to fit within their own cultural, social and ideological frameworks of understanding. The replacement of a historical blemish, such as the corporeal violence associated with the Bargello prison, with a new historical monument, the Bargello museum, in the nineteenth century effectively drew on the power of the place to project both backward into the past and forward into the future. By transforming the site into a cultural institution that still retained its architectural shell, the museum displayed its institutional past to expose its foreignness to the present moment and initiated the creation of a new meta-narrative of Italian judicial, and cultural, history.
A key strategy of late medieval and early modern criminal prosecution in Europe was the systemati... more A key strategy of late medieval and early modern criminal prosecution in Europe was the systematic objectification of the criminal body. This aim is no better illustrated than by the use of effigies—recorded from the thirteenth century—to stand in for the convicted when physical presence was not possible. In situations such as criminal escape, premature death, or inconclusive identification, artists were hired to create a free-standing, portable effigy of the missing criminal-subject, which was tried, tormented and executed before crowds of witnesses. If the image was punished properly, then justice was served and the populace assuaged. That is, the image-substitute for the criminal body attained the same efficacy as “the real thing” in spectacles of punishment. This book chapter examines the punishment of effigies as acts of judicially-sanctioned iconoclasm in late medieval and early modern Europe, and seeks to theorize the visual spectacularism of the image-execution as a means of creating an image of the community.
![Research paper thumbnail of Allie Terry-Fritsch, "Animal Trials, Humiliation Rituals, and the Sensing of the Criminal Offender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe." [Terry-Fritsch_AnimalTrials.pdf]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/56202839/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Allie Terry-Fritsch, "Animal Trials, Humiliation Rituals, and the Sensing of the Criminal Offende... more Allie Terry-Fritsch, "Animal Trials, Humiliation Rituals, and the Sensing of the Criminal Offender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe." in Visualizing Sensuous Suffering: Pain in the Early Modern Visual Arts of Europe and the Americas, eds. Heather Sexton Graham and Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank. Leiden: Brill Press, 2018, 53-81.
"A delicately crafted bronze sculpture, small enough to fit in the palm of one's hand, takes the ... more "A delicately crafted bronze sculpture, small enough to fit in the palm of one's hand, takes the form of a satyr's head and rests on a pear-shaped base in the Museo della Tortura in San Gimignano. From the small lines of the satyr's furrowed brow to his impishly upturned lips, each of the facial features is intricately detailed, as are each of the decorated segments of the base. The size and shape of the object are reminiscent of the small-scale bronze desk ornaments that came into vogue with Italian humanist patrons toward the end of the fifteenth century. Yet, this bronze satyr was intended for a very different function in the Quattrocento: it was held in the hands of a torturer during state-administered punishment rituals and was used to inscribe pain within the body of a sexual offender. Called alternatively an Anal Pear or a Vaginal Pear, this object was constructed so that the petals of the base could be slowly opened until the orifice was literally torn apart, thereby ensuring that the sexual deviant would never again be able to receive penetration.
Taking the bronze satyr in San Gimignano as a point of departure, this paper will focus on the form and function of these little-studied, but highly decorative, torture instruments in Italy and will question the conflation of art and punishment in the fifteenth century. While punishment of criminals during this period often included the public display of the criminal's body and torture was often publicly administered, the actual instruments of torture were of such a size that they would have been seen only by the ministers of justice and the criminal, viewers that do not readily explain the high quality of craftsmanship of the objects. In this essay I argue that the close-viewing experience of the decorated torture instrument by the criminal was inversely related to the function of the well-known painted panels (tavole) held before the criminal during his or her procession to the gallows; while the latter presented an image of the suffering Christ to the criminal as a personal vehicle for repentance, the torture instruments took diabolical shapes that I argue served both as a reminder of the criminal act performed against the community and the physical cleansing that was necessary to rid the city of the criminal's transgression. Though the populace would not have had the viewing access to the remarkable detail of the torture instrument, the handling of these highly crafted instruments by the anonymous torturer may be considered the enactment of the communal will upon the body of the criminal. "
This essay explores medieval and early modern viewers’ uses of the senses as a means to process t... more This essay explores medieval and early modern viewers’ uses of the senses as a means to process the performance of violence. Centering my theoretical discussion on the examination of Christ’s body in Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas, I probe the nature of witnessing violence in the embodied cues of its victims. The interdependence of doubt and verification, visuality and tactility, and marginality and collectivity expressed within the scene of encounter between Christ and Thomas was mirrored in early modern experiences of violence, particularly in events staged with an underlying intention to build community. As stressed throughout the essay, bodily experience and the performance of viewing are critical to the exploration of the gaze, since the very act of looking produces meaning in the beholder. By examining the moment of piercing in the painting in relation to the social positions of viewers in the juridical, medical and anatomical spheres, the essay offers a new way to consider violence as a vital means for the casting off of doubt and for the production of new forms of knowledge that bound the individual to the larger community. Through examinations of violence rendered onto aberrant bodies, early modern individuals came to know the values that underscored the larger collective and were encouraged to follow a particular model of behavior. The image of violence, traced onto the bodies of others, served, then, to foster an inward gaze of the viewing subject.
The Visual Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe, eds. Timothy D. McCall, Giancarlo Fiorenza, and Sean Roberts. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2013
"This essay examines the phenomenon of secret denunciation in fifteenth-century Florence. It trac... more "This essay examines the phenomenon of secret denunciation in fifteenth-century Florence. It traces the material history of tamburi, special containers that once were used to collect anonymous denunciations, and investigates how their insertion into the physical and ritual center of the city altered the symbolic content of it and impacted modes of sociability. Although tamburi have been largely forgotten in art-historical investigations of the material and visual culture of Renaissance Florence, they were in common use throughout the fifteenth-century. Erected in strategic architectural locations such as the cathedral and governmental palace, these denunciation boxes were easily accessible to a wide Florentine public, who was encouraged by authoritative agencies to use them actively. Anyone who witnessed deviant behavior in the city could use a tamburo to transmit an anonymous denunciation against the malefactor; the witness would write down information regarding the identity or identities of the deviant(s) along with a description of the incident, then place it into one of the tamburi without signature. Once the denunciation was inserted into the box, it remained locked inside for up to a month, the whole time shielded from public view. Eventually an administrator of the authoritative agency opened the tamburo and its contents—the written denunciations—were transported to the judicial courts and entered into an official registry. Each denunciation was evaluated and investigated, and, ultimately, the individual implicated in the denunciation was judged and forced to accept the appropriate consequences.
This essay considers the strategies and tactics of the denunciation system in fifteenth-century Florence to examine how the placement and use of tamburi within key ritual sites impacted communal interaction in the Renaissance city. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s use of the terms “strategies” and “tactics,” the essay designates strategies as the various methods used by those in control of spaces to police and manipulate behaviors within them and tactics as the methods used by the actual users of those spaces; these users are not in possession of the space, but, nonetheless, they occupy it and maneuver through it according to either pre-established rules or by alternative routes. As I argue here, the tamburi may be approached as strategies that fostered heightened awareness of visibility within the renaissance city, both the visibility of individuals to others and of others to the individual. Their physical placement within select architectural spaces impacted the perceived layers of control already implied in these buildings’ function and use, and the moral agencies in charge of their erection and upkeep anticipated how the symbolic meaning and social value of these spaces would underscore the moral imperative to use them both to reveal information about others and avoid the behaviors that would lead to denunciation. Nonetheless, the tactics employed by individuals and groups within the city—those time-based interactions within the spaces themselves—were unpredictable, and therefore never fully visible. Ultimately, these tactics counteracted the power of the tamburi, and in certain cases, caused their failure."
Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300-1350, ed. Christine Sciacca. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012, 201-203.
Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300-1350, ed. Christine Sciacca. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012, 198-201.
Amsterdam University Press, 2020, 2020
Viewers in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were encouraged to forge connections between their phy... more Viewers in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were encouraged to forge connections between their physical and affective states when they experienced works of art. They believed that their bodies served a critical function in coming to know and make sense of the world around them, and intimately engaged themselves with works of art and architecture on a daily basis. This book examines how viewers in Medicean Florence were self-consciously cultivated to enhance their sensory appreciation of works of art and creatively self-fashion through somaesthetic experience. Mobilized as a technology for the production of knowledge with and through their bodies, viewers contributed to the essential meaning of Renaissance art and, in the process, bound themselves to others. By investigating the framework and practice of somaesthetic viewing of works by Benozzo Gozzoli, Donatello, Benedetto Buglioni, Giorgio Vasari, and others in fifteenth and sixteenth century Florence, the book approaches the viewer as a powerful tool that was used by patrons to shape identity and power in the Renaissance.
In this radical reassessment of Fra Angelico’s frescoes at San Marco in Florence, Allie Terry-Fri... more In this radical reassessment of Fra Angelico’s frescoes at San Marco in Florence, Allie Terry-Fritsch connects the history of the Observant Dominican convent’s fifteenth-century patron, Cosimo de’Medici, with the history of its once famous public library to recover a nearly forgotten, but critical, audience for the artist’s work comprised of lay humanists. Fra Angelico’s Public traces the footsteps of the secular users of the San Marco library through the church, convent, and dormitory and examines the painted marvels that they encountered along the way. Considering the intersections between the iconography and style of the San Marco paintings with the intellectual interests of the library users and the larger social world of Medicean Florence, Fra Angelico’s Public recasts Angelico as an artist who, in addition to his life as a friar, was a clever participant in humanist culture and painted in ways that resonated with their habits of mind. By means of visual, theoretical, and historical study, the book considers how Angelico’s paintings reference popular religious culture in Quattrocento Florence and became vehicles through which the lay-humanist audience participated in a collective viewing experience that framed their intellectual endeavors at San Marco, as well as Cosimo de’Medici’s role as patron, within the political ideology of the city at large. Investigating the political effects such a message may have had on its humanist audience at San Marco, Terry-Fritsch examines the aesthetic offered by Fra Angelico at San Marco in a new light, one that moves beyond the cloister walls and into the public realm.
"Interested in the ways in which medieval and early modern communities have acted as participants... more "Interested in the ways in which medieval and early modern communities have acted as participants, observers, and interpreters of events and how they ascribed meaning to them, the essays in this collection probe the individual or collective beholders of violence during the period and question how they made sense of the world around them. Addressing a range of medieval and early modern art forms, including visual images, objects, texts, and performances, the contributors examine the complexities of viewing and the production of knowledge across temporal moments.
In considering new methods to examine the beholder's perspective, this volume addresses such questions as: Can we speak of such a thing as the "period eye" or an acculturated gaze of the viewer? If so, does this particularize the gaze or does it risk universalizing perception and thus empty out the very certainty that it seeks to confirm? How do violence and pleasure intersect within the visual and literary arts? How can an understanding of violence in cultural representation serve as means of knowing the past and as means of understanding and potentially altering the present?"
Performing the Sacred: Christian Representation and the Arts, ed. Carla M. Bino and Corinna Ricasoli, 2023
The innovative artistic program of the Sacro Monte di Varallo, which combines architecture, wall ... more The innovative artistic program of the Sacro Monte di Varallo, which combines architecture, wall and ceiling paintings, and life-sized polychromed statues, traditionally has been cast as staging a frozen performance of the Bible for pilgrims. This essay shifts attention away from the frozen sculpted and painted actors of the individual chapels and instead focuses on the dramatic roles played by the mobile, sentient Renaissance pilgrims who performed in their spaces. As the essay highlights, the artistic program functioned as an immersive installation that invited the live pilgrim to perform the Bible, thus turning the table on traditional conceptions of stage and actor.
Open Arts Journal, Jan 2015
This essay examines the ways in which renaissance pilgrims cultivated their bodies and minds to e... more This essay examines the ways in which renaissance pilgrims cultivated their bodies and minds to enhance aesthetic and devotional experience at the Sacro Monte di Varallo, a late fifteenth-century simulation of the Holy Land located in northern Italy. Built by a team of architects, painters and sculptors at the behest of Franciscan friars, the Holy Land at Varallo presented to the pilgrim a series of interactive spaces housed in independent architectural units, each containing life-sized wooden or terracotta sculptures of Biblical figures adorned with real hair, clothes and shoes, and situated in frescoed narratival environments. Pilgrims were led to each architectural site along a fixed path and encountered the Biblical scenes in a strict sequence that was narrated by a Franciscan friar. If the pilgrim engaged in proper performances of body-mindfulness, the site served as a pilgrimage destination that was equally enriching as “the real thing,” that is, Jerusalem itself. This essay questions how the active cultivation of the pilgrim’s body and mind contributed to a heightened somaesthetic encounter within the multi-media interactive chapels at the site and argues that the mindful manipulation of the body functioned as what the performance studies theorist Diana Taylor has called a “vital act of transfer.” That is, it transmitted carefully crafted knowledge of the past and the self through reiterated acts that impacted in significant ways the identity formation of the spectator-participant, as well as the community of spectators who surrounded them.
By considering the historical experience of the site, this essay ultimately provides an alternative explanation for artistic style at Varallo, which, as argued here, must be understood through the somaesthetics of the artistic program’s original viewers. The physical performance of viewing at Varallo accentuated awareness in all sensory receptors to activate the prosthetic body and mind of pilgrims, who were physically challenged while simultaneously mentally engaged as they made their way through the steep and winding landscape of the site. Invited to enter into the architectural environments and to touch, smell, taste and hear, in addition to view the holy simulacra, both male and female pilgrims recorded the powerful affective bonds produced through such active bodily cultivation and spiritual stimulation. Thus, in many ways, the somaesthetic strategies employed at Varallo enabled pilgrims to move beyond traditional gendered notions of the performance of the body in devotional contexts and to assume the role of both a Biblical personage (or multiples thereof) and a contemporary pilgrim to the Holy Land.
By approaching the Observant Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence as a “practiced place,” t... more By approaching the Observant Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence as a “practiced place,” this essay considers the secular users of the convent’s library as mobile spectators that necessarily navigated the cloister and dormitory and, in so doing, recovers, for the first time, their embodied experience of the architectural pathway and the frescoed decoration along the way. To begin this process, the essay recovers the original “public” for the library at San Marco, then reconstructs the pathway through the convent that this secular audience once traveled to reach it. By practicing the place, the essay considers Fra Angelico’s extensive fresco decoration along this path as part of an integrated “humanist itinerary.” In this way, Angelico’s decoration may be understood as not only a deposit of a social relationship between the mendicant artist and his merchant patron. It also may be read, for the first time in art-historical scholarship, as a direct means of visual communication with the convent’s previously unrecognized public audience and an indicator of these viewers’ political and intellectual practices within the Florentine convent.
This essay presents a new reading of Fra Angelico's frescoes at San Marco in terms of the secular... more This essay presents a new reading of Fra Angelico's frescoes at San Marco in terms of the secular humanist audience that once had access to the site in the mid-Quattrocento. The frescoes that lined the humanist itinerary from the ground floor entrance of the convent to the library on the primo piano are stylistically distinct from those frescoes made for the Observant Dominican friars within the dormitory and are notable for their elimination of spatial cues in favor of vast color fields. As I argue here, the frescoes made for the humanist-users of the library represent a pictorial language of the icon that would have spoken to Cosimo de'Medici and his fellow humanists in an erudite alternative to current Florentine artistic theories revolving around Albertian perspective. I argue that the contemporary intellectual and political interests of the humanists-- above all their current Greek translation work and their exposure to Byzantine images through their collecting pursuits in the Byzantine empire-- impacted their approach to these paintings. I suggest that the humanists were making visual and theoretical connections between Angelico's paintings and Neoplatonic and Byzantine theories of images, for Angelico's color fields are theoretically analogous to the Neoplatonic writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and are tied in form and function to Byzantine mosaics and icons. Situating San Marco within this framework, new modes of understanding the intellectual and political significance of Angelico's work come to light.
Abstract: The positive reception of sacre rappresentazioni by an Eastern official at the Council... more Abstract:
The positive reception of sacre rappresentazioni by an Eastern official at the Council of Florence (1439) counters recent claims that visual representation in the West failed to communicate across cultures in the fifteenth century. The essay analyzes the form and function of the sacred dramas to probe the relationship between pictorial and dramatic representation and the theological foundation of the Byzantine image. The sacred dramas arguably function in an aesthetic mode akin to the Baroque conception of meraviglia, which is examined as a form of visual rhetoric that allowed for cross-cultural communication in fifteenth-century Florence.
ABSTRACT: While Donatello’s bronze sculptures of Judith and David are stylistically discrete, an... more ABSTRACT:
While Donatello’s bronze sculptures of Judith and David are stylistically discrete, and may have been originally created in and for different contexts, they are firmly connected to one another through their content: both figures clearly are characterized as active agents of decapitation. As this article argues, the Medici fostered a familial association with the iconographic, symbolic and practical language of decapitation in Florence since the Albizzi coup of 1433-4, when the family came to be associated with the feast of St. John the Baptist’s martyrdom, through the placement of the Donatello sculptures in the family palace in the 1460s. Although rarely mentioned in the vast art-historical literature on the Medici, visual allusions to beheadings in paint, performance and sculpture served a rhetorical function in Florence to describe the shifting political status of Cosimo de’Medici and his family. By outlining a cultural map by which this visual rhetoric of decapitation may be charted in relation to the Medici family, this article contributes yet a further layer of meaning to the Donatello sculptures within the larger context of early Medici patronage and politics and offers a new methodological approach for the investigation of early modern Florentine visual culture.
This essay approaches Donatello’s fifteenth-century bronze sculpture of Judith as a dramatic acto... more This essay approaches Donatello’s fifteenth-century bronze sculpture of Judith as a dramatic actor in “The Story of Judith, Hebrew Widow,” the sacred story written by Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’Medici in the 1470s. When considered as a text to be performed, Lucrezia’s sacred narrative fostered a particular way of viewing Donatello’s sculpture in the garden of the Palazzo Medici. Lucrezia’s words signal moments in which her audience was expected to look up and see, particularly when she speaks of Judith. During these active visual moments, Lucrezia strays from the standard narrative of the female heroine and either embellishes or leaves out content. In these self-conscious expansions and gaps in the narrative, the audience was invited to read into the narrative and personalize its protagonist, which, in Lucrezia’s daily world, was vividly evoked in material form in Donatello’s bronze Judith in the garden. Just as in Florentine sacre rappresentazioni, Donatello’s sculptural group acted out the demonstration of justice through its gestural performance. Furthermore, Lucrezia’s manipulation of her audience’s somaesthetic experience may be connected to the subtle way that the matron shaped her own identity within the intimate circles of the Medici family. Such performative interplay between listening inside the palace and witnessing Florentine identity politics in dramatic sculptural form is critical for understanding the full visual and symbolic potential of the statue in the garden as well as its leading lady in the 1470s.
in Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Ed. Merry Wiesner-Hanks (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017).
By examining the type of beholding experience that was cultivated for condemned criminals in Flor... more By examining the type of beholding experience that was cultivated for condemned criminals in Florence, this paper challenges previous readings of the criminal process within a strictly Christological framework and provides a new interpretation of Fra Angelico’s Lamentation, made for the the site known as the "Tempio" in Florence. I argue that the gaze of the criminal before Fra Angelico’s altarpiece was rendered Magdalenian in nature, for the criminal was positioned as a sinner in a moment of conversion. The visual imagery that surrounded the criminal throughout the day of execution, as well as the somaesthetic stimulation of the penal rituals, prepared the criminal beholder for this transformative performance in front of Angelico’s altarpiece. Like Mary Magdalen, who prostrated herself before the body of Christ in repentance of her material indulgences, the criminal was faced with the incarnate vision of God and asked to make the cognitive shift from the material to the spiritual. Transcending issues of gender and class, the Magdalenian gaze was understood in fifteenth-century Florence as part of a larger repetoire of prayers and bodily gestures that communicated a specific request for forgiveness and the promise of redemption through reformed behavior. The criminal adoption of a Magdalenian stance at the last hour thus precipitated the redemption that was necessary for the soul’s ascension after the expiration of the criminal body.
Abstract: Using the Bargello as the focus of an inquiry on material culture, historical framing... more Abstract:
Using the Bargello as the focus of an inquiry on material culture, historical framing and aesthetic cultivation, this essay interrogates the use of violence as an aesthetic frame for tourists to Florence, and examines the architectural transformation of the prison in terms of the cultural agenda of the nineteenth-century Risorgimento and its manipulation of the material culture of the city. As scholars of the early modern period increasingly have begun to recognize, the writers, artists, governmental officials and other communities involved in the production of knowledge in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries largely fashioned the image of the renaissance in Florence and elsewhere to fit within their own cultural, social and ideological frameworks of understanding. The replacement of a historical blemish, such as the corporeal violence associated with the Bargello prison, with a new historical monument, the Bargello museum, in the nineteenth century effectively drew on the power of the place to project both backward into the past and forward into the future. By transforming the site into a cultural institution that still retained its architectural shell, the museum displayed its institutional past to expose its foreignness to the present moment and initiated the creation of a new meta-narrative of Italian judicial, and cultural, history.
A key strategy of late medieval and early modern criminal prosecution in Europe was the systemati... more A key strategy of late medieval and early modern criminal prosecution in Europe was the systematic objectification of the criminal body. This aim is no better illustrated than by the use of effigies—recorded from the thirteenth century—to stand in for the convicted when physical presence was not possible. In situations such as criminal escape, premature death, or inconclusive identification, artists were hired to create a free-standing, portable effigy of the missing criminal-subject, which was tried, tormented and executed before crowds of witnesses. If the image was punished properly, then justice was served and the populace assuaged. That is, the image-substitute for the criminal body attained the same efficacy as “the real thing” in spectacles of punishment. This book chapter examines the punishment of effigies as acts of judicially-sanctioned iconoclasm in late medieval and early modern Europe, and seeks to theorize the visual spectacularism of the image-execution as a means of creating an image of the community.
Allie Terry-Fritsch, "Animal Trials, Humiliation Rituals, and the Sensing of the Criminal Offende... more Allie Terry-Fritsch, "Animal Trials, Humiliation Rituals, and the Sensing of the Criminal Offender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe." in Visualizing Sensuous Suffering: Pain in the Early Modern Visual Arts of Europe and the Americas, eds. Heather Sexton Graham and Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank. Leiden: Brill Press, 2018, 53-81.
"A delicately crafted bronze sculpture, small enough to fit in the palm of one's hand, takes the ... more "A delicately crafted bronze sculpture, small enough to fit in the palm of one's hand, takes the form of a satyr's head and rests on a pear-shaped base in the Museo della Tortura in San Gimignano. From the small lines of the satyr's furrowed brow to his impishly upturned lips, each of the facial features is intricately detailed, as are each of the decorated segments of the base. The size and shape of the object are reminiscent of the small-scale bronze desk ornaments that came into vogue with Italian humanist patrons toward the end of the fifteenth century. Yet, this bronze satyr was intended for a very different function in the Quattrocento: it was held in the hands of a torturer during state-administered punishment rituals and was used to inscribe pain within the body of a sexual offender. Called alternatively an Anal Pear or a Vaginal Pear, this object was constructed so that the petals of the base could be slowly opened until the orifice was literally torn apart, thereby ensuring that the sexual deviant would never again be able to receive penetration.
Taking the bronze satyr in San Gimignano as a point of departure, this paper will focus on the form and function of these little-studied, but highly decorative, torture instruments in Italy and will question the conflation of art and punishment in the fifteenth century. While punishment of criminals during this period often included the public display of the criminal's body and torture was often publicly administered, the actual instruments of torture were of such a size that they would have been seen only by the ministers of justice and the criminal, viewers that do not readily explain the high quality of craftsmanship of the objects. In this essay I argue that the close-viewing experience of the decorated torture instrument by the criminal was inversely related to the function of the well-known painted panels (tavole) held before the criminal during his or her procession to the gallows; while the latter presented an image of the suffering Christ to the criminal as a personal vehicle for repentance, the torture instruments took diabolical shapes that I argue served both as a reminder of the criminal act performed against the community and the physical cleansing that was necessary to rid the city of the criminal's transgression. Though the populace would not have had the viewing access to the remarkable detail of the torture instrument, the handling of these highly crafted instruments by the anonymous torturer may be considered the enactment of the communal will upon the body of the criminal. "
This essay explores medieval and early modern viewers’ uses of the senses as a means to process t... more This essay explores medieval and early modern viewers’ uses of the senses as a means to process the performance of violence. Centering my theoretical discussion on the examination of Christ’s body in Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas, I probe the nature of witnessing violence in the embodied cues of its victims. The interdependence of doubt and verification, visuality and tactility, and marginality and collectivity expressed within the scene of encounter between Christ and Thomas was mirrored in early modern experiences of violence, particularly in events staged with an underlying intention to build community. As stressed throughout the essay, bodily experience and the performance of viewing are critical to the exploration of the gaze, since the very act of looking produces meaning in the beholder. By examining the moment of piercing in the painting in relation to the social positions of viewers in the juridical, medical and anatomical spheres, the essay offers a new way to consider violence as a vital means for the casting off of doubt and for the production of new forms of knowledge that bound the individual to the larger community. Through examinations of violence rendered onto aberrant bodies, early modern individuals came to know the values that underscored the larger collective and were encouraged to follow a particular model of behavior. The image of violence, traced onto the bodies of others, served, then, to foster an inward gaze of the viewing subject.
The Visual Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe, eds. Timothy D. McCall, Giancarlo Fiorenza, and Sean Roberts. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2013
"This essay examines the phenomenon of secret denunciation in fifteenth-century Florence. It trac... more "This essay examines the phenomenon of secret denunciation in fifteenth-century Florence. It traces the material history of tamburi, special containers that once were used to collect anonymous denunciations, and investigates how their insertion into the physical and ritual center of the city altered the symbolic content of it and impacted modes of sociability. Although tamburi have been largely forgotten in art-historical investigations of the material and visual culture of Renaissance Florence, they were in common use throughout the fifteenth-century. Erected in strategic architectural locations such as the cathedral and governmental palace, these denunciation boxes were easily accessible to a wide Florentine public, who was encouraged by authoritative agencies to use them actively. Anyone who witnessed deviant behavior in the city could use a tamburo to transmit an anonymous denunciation against the malefactor; the witness would write down information regarding the identity or identities of the deviant(s) along with a description of the incident, then place it into one of the tamburi without signature. Once the denunciation was inserted into the box, it remained locked inside for up to a month, the whole time shielded from public view. Eventually an administrator of the authoritative agency opened the tamburo and its contents—the written denunciations—were transported to the judicial courts and entered into an official registry. Each denunciation was evaluated and investigated, and, ultimately, the individual implicated in the denunciation was judged and forced to accept the appropriate consequences.
This essay considers the strategies and tactics of the denunciation system in fifteenth-century Florence to examine how the placement and use of tamburi within key ritual sites impacted communal interaction in the Renaissance city. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s use of the terms “strategies” and “tactics,” the essay designates strategies as the various methods used by those in control of spaces to police and manipulate behaviors within them and tactics as the methods used by the actual users of those spaces; these users are not in possession of the space, but, nonetheless, they occupy it and maneuver through it according to either pre-established rules or by alternative routes. As I argue here, the tamburi may be approached as strategies that fostered heightened awareness of visibility within the renaissance city, both the visibility of individuals to others and of others to the individual. Their physical placement within select architectural spaces impacted the perceived layers of control already implied in these buildings’ function and use, and the moral agencies in charge of their erection and upkeep anticipated how the symbolic meaning and social value of these spaces would underscore the moral imperative to use them both to reveal information about others and avoid the behaviors that would lead to denunciation. Nonetheless, the tactics employed by individuals and groups within the city—those time-based interactions within the spaces themselves—were unpredictable, and therefore never fully visible. Ultimately, these tactics counteracted the power of the tamburi, and in certain cases, caused their failure."
Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300-1350, ed. Christine Sciacca. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012, 201-203.
Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300-1350, ed. Christine Sciacca. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012, 198-201.
Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300-1350, ed. Christine Sciacca. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012, 181-186.
Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300-1350, ed. Christine Sciacca. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012, 74-75.
Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300-1350, ed. Christine Sciacca. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012, 69-73.
Architectural Histories, 2022
Review of the 'Hidden Florence' digital app
The Sixteenth-Century Studies Journal: The Journal of Early Modern Studies, Vol. XLIII, No. 4 (Winter 2012): 1247-1249.
The Passionate Triangle is a far-ranging and ambitious cultural history of one of the most import... more The Passionate Triangle is a far-ranging and ambitious cultural history of one of the most important geometric forms of the Renaissance. Triangles once occupied a central position in late medieval and Renaissance discourses and practices of theology, geometry, cartography, astronomy, architecture, the visual arts, and vision itself, and yet, as Rebecca Zorach laments at the beginning of the book, such a fundamental form-the basic building block of all things, according to Plato-ultimately has become a trope within the present discipline of art history. As she suggests, partly to blame is a disciplinary overemphasis on the triangle as a compositional formula. Since at least Heinrich Wölfflin, and encouraged by the modernist privileging of form over content, the discipline has offered an entrenched narrative about High Renaissance style to students that has had the result of a general obfuscation of the triangle's intellectual associations. The book recovers a rich history of triangles' many real, implied, and imagined forms, as well as their mathematical, spiritual, artistic, and other uses, to suggest new interpretations of some of the key works of Italian Renaissance
The Journal of Somaesthetics (Vol. 7, No. 2), 2021
Review of "Allie Terry-Fritsch, Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence: Rena... more Review of "Allie Terry-Fritsch, Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence: Renaissance Art and Political Persuasion, 1459-1580 (AUP, 2020)
state formation, and the transfer of resources and authority from the institutions of medieval re... more state formation, and the transfer of resources and authority from the institutions of medieval religion and society to those of the princely states and territorial churches. This is all well and good, and could have formed the basis of an interesting study, but such broader perspectives are largely missing in the text. The European context is well represented with a good account of the relations of the Scandinavian kingdoms to powers such as the Hanseatic towns, the Emperor, the Netherlands, and France, but this is not discussed in terms of integration in the European state formation process.
School of Art Faculty Spotlight Series, 2021
Interview of Allie Terry-Fritsch by BGSU School of Art Director, Charles Kanwischer. Link to the ... more Interview of Allie Terry-Fritsch by BGSU School of Art Director, Charles Kanwischer. Link to the videocast is: https://vimeo.com/630275156
Link to video: https://vimeo.com/535978180 Hosted by the School of Art at Bowling Green State Un... more Link to video: https://vimeo.com/535978180
Hosted by the School of Art at Bowling Green State University, this event celebrates the publication of Professor Terry-Fritsch's latest book with an author reading and a dialogue between Dr. Terry-Fritsch and Charlie Kanwischer, Director of the School of Art, about the ideas in the book, where they came from, and what future applications the methods and theories of the book may be envisioned
Somaesthetic fashioning, a term used in recent years to point to the purposeful cultivation of th... more Somaesthetic fashioning, a term used in recent years to point to the purposeful cultivation of the mind-body connections of an individual to heighten aesthetic experience, has emerged in art-historical discourse as a means to argue for and to better understand certain contemporary art practices. Grounded in John Dewey’s democratic approach to art as experience, the somaesthetic tradition advocates for the cultivation of active and interested aesthetic experiences through the engagement of the body together with the mind. While somaesthetics as a discipline, until now, has been decidedly focused on present artistic and performative practices, this paper opens the academic session on "Historicizing Somaesthetics: Body-Mind Connections of the Medieval and Early Modern Viewer," which features papers that consider how somaesthetic philosophy can be used to examine aesthetic experience in Medieval and Early Modern culture. By historicizing somaesthetics, this session seeks to reconnect the mind and bodies of historical viewers and forge a new theoretical construct of the historicized aesthetic experience in decidedly art-historical terms. Thus, moving beyond anthropological notions of “ritual,” “religious practice,” and “performance” or intellectual and scientific traditions regarding the visual process, this panel seeks to explore Medieval and Early Modern aesthetic experiences as part of a multi-sensory engagement that purposefully used the body in relation to the mind to cultivate meaning in the spectator.
Full title: Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence: Renaissance Art and Poli... more Full title: Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence: Renaissance Art and Political Persuasion, 1459-1580
Author: Allie Terry-Fritsch
Series: Visual & Material Culture, 1300-1700
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Viewers in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were encouraged to forge connections between their physical and affective states when they experienced works of art. They believed that their bodies served a critical function in coming to know and make sense of the world around them, and intimately engaged themselves with works of art and architecture on a daily basis. This book examines how viewers in Medicean Florence were self-consciously cultivated to enhance their sensory appreciation of works of art and creatively self-fashion through somaesthetics. Mobilized as a technology for the production of knowledge with and through their bodies, viewers contributed to the essential meaning of Renaissance art and, in the process, bound themselves to others. By investigating the framework and practice of somaesthetic experience of works by Benozzo Gozzoli, Donatello, Benedetto Buglioni, Giorgio Vasari, and others in fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury Florence, the book approaches the viewer as a powerful tool that was used by patrons to shape identity and power in the Renaissance.
Download the table of contents and Intro at: https://assets.ctfassets.net/4wrp2um278k7/62BJ1eDaDnyBlinBbnOua9/c143bb79b451696dc07f95b8f85b8a6a/9789048544240_Preview.pdf
For more information, visit: https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463722216/somaesthetic-experience-and-the-viewer-in-medicean-florence
Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 2017
Contents: Foreword, W.J.T. Mitchell Introduction: beholding violence, Erin Felicia Labbie and All... more Contents: Foreword, W.J.T. Mitchell Introduction: beholding violence, Erin Felicia Labbie and Allie Terry-Fritsch Proof in pierced flesh: Caravaggio's Doubting Thomas and the beholder of wounds in early modern Italy, Allie Terry-Fritsch Giovanni Pisano's marble wounds: beholding artistic self-defense in the Pisa cathedral pulpit, Matthew G. Shoaf Beholding and touching: early modern strategies of negotiating illness, Mirella G. Pardee The gap of death: passive violence in the encounter between the Three Dead and the Three Living, Elina Gertsman Being beheld: Julian of Norwich's mystical surreal and the violence of vision, Christopher Taylor Image in pain: icons, old bones and new blood, Galina Tirnanic 'To have the pleasure of this siege': envisioning siege warfare during the European wars of religion, Brian Sandberg Theatrum mundi: performativity, violence and metatheatre in Webster's The White Devil, Lisa Dickson Portia's Pauline perversion: The Merchant of Venice and Romans I, Will Stockton Violent passions: plays, pawnbrokers, and the Jews of Rome, 1539, Barbara Wisch Beholding typology: the violence of recognition in Caravaggio's representations of the Sacrifice of Isaac, Erin Felicia Labbie Bibliography Index.
Giancarla Periti. In the Courts of Religious Ladies: Art, Vision, and Pleasure in Italian Renaiss... more Giancarla Periti. In the Courts of Religious Ladies: Art, Vision, and Pleasure in Italian Renaissance Convents. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016. ix+ 294 pp. $75.00. Review by Allie Terry-Fritsch, Bowling Green State University.
The epilogue highlights a somaesthetic turn in contemporary pedagogical tools used to teach the R... more The epilogue highlights a somaesthetic turn in contemporary pedagogical tools used to teach the Renaissance and engage virtual viewers. It highlights select cases of digital humanities projects to demonstrate how researchers have provided new sensory-driven access to historical experience, and explores how the digital platform disrupts hegemonic discourse through its design, which relies on a user’s actions to generate a personalized experience. The epilogue argues that mindful interaction with these tools provides a means to come to know Renaissance works through the body and points to the constructive ways that somaesthetic cultivation can reinvigorate the first-hand experience of art in the museum and beyond.
Chapter Five closely examines the first illustrated treatise of the Florentine ball game known as... more Chapter Five closely examines the first illustrated treatise of the Florentine ball game known as calcio, published and dedicated to Grand Duke Francesco I by Giovanni de’Bardi in 1580, to reconstruct the somaesthetic experience of reading and playing a virtual game. Analyzing the imagery and text of the treatise in relation to military tactics, ceremonial culture, and the wider visual culture of leisure in the Renaissance, the chapter argues that the treatise offered a performative space for readers to act out the game and demonstrate a form of command that was otherwise reserved for the Grand Duke and his inner circle. The chapter explores how the treatise somaesthetically constructs the reader as a subject in relation to the Medici family and encourages a mode of comportment that reflected the ideals of Florentine governance.
Architectural Histories, 2022
Digital reviews 2022